Convenience, safety, low price and good aesthetic qualities are among the major factors that makes plastics useful for numerous applications. Synthetic polymers that are produced from petrochemical products have low recovery/reproduction rates and are not easily degraded in the environment.
New bio-based materials have been explored to develop edible and biodegradable films to tackle the issue of polymeric waste materials (Tharanathan, 2003). Among various biodegradable polymers, poly (lactic acid) (PLA), biodegradable aliphatic polyester is an ideal candidate due to the fact that it can be derived from 100% renewable resources, such as corn and sugar beets. PLA is widely used in medical applications and has a great potential in the packaging industry (Bastioli, 2001; Lunt, 1998).
While biodegradable polymers are environmentally benign and are often produced from sustainable agricultural raw materials, the penetration of biodegradable polymers in the marketplace has encountered various barriers including cost and performance issues. For example, some of the properties such as brittleness, low heat distortion temperature, high gas permeability, and low melt viscosity for further processing restrict their use in a wide range of applications (Sinha Ray, Yamada, Okamoto, Fujimoto, Ogami & Ueda, 2003). Modification of the biodegradable polymers through innovative nanotechnology opens up new possibilities for improving not only the properties but also the cost-price-efficiency.